Indeed, check out the weather service's forecast maps for today, Wednesday and Thursday. We'll put them in a little slideshow. See how the blue area shrinks while the red, yellow and green areas expand? That's a sign of temperatures returning to normal across most of the nation.

Now, while the deep freeze is still here, we do not want to encourage anyone to do anything dumb. However, as Eyder wrote Monday, there are some cold-weather experiments you might want to try. We're particularly struck by how beautiful frozen soap bubbles can be.

Our friends at Morning Edition have also asked folks to share photos and stories of fun (and safe) things they're doing in the cold. They're collecting the responses in a Storify box that we'll embed below.

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